The Secret Marriage at Sadler’s Wells Peacock, WC2

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This was the marriage opera that the Viennese couldn’t get enough of in the late 18th century. No, not Mozart’s Figaro
but Cimarosa’s opera buffa, another upstairs-downstairs comedy that tickled Leopold II’s funny bone so strenuously that he reportedly ordered an encore of the entire opera after its February 1792 premiere.

Thank goodness no cloth-eared Habsburgs were there when British Youth Opera (BYO) took the questionable decision of exhuming the opera, the second production of their short annual season. BYO’s artistic director Peter Robinson calls Il matrimonio segreto a “masterpiece”, but he wisely ducks out of conducting a score that